Category Archives: northtexasfll

Investing in the stock market can offer several benefits. First, it’s an excellent place to gain familiarity with the investment process. Second, trading stocks is fast, easy, and completely risk free. Third, investors can benefit from the knowledge of the stock market in order to diversify their investments and advance their careers. But, doing everything correctly, there are still two mistakes to avoid and two ways to make an investment mistake.

The first mistake is to make too much investment activity at once. Many people who invest in small amounts of money have this problem. At first, an investment of $10,000 in the stock market is great. However, as the year goes on, the progress of the stock market becomes less steady. If you believe you have a great stock, you may simply continue to buy shares, since you’ve made so much money already. However, if the market falls, you will have made no progress, and it will be difficult for you to recover.

By investing in a smaller amount at first, you’ll reduce your risk in the future, and will be able to profit from price fluctuations more easily.

The second mistake is to try to get too many investments into one. All the different types of stock you have to invest in may not be a good idea at the same time. Do you think investing in most stocks at the same time is a good idea? It’s definitely not. While you may feel like you want to get into the best stocks, most of those stocks are much less promising than others, which makes it difficult to focus on the more important stocks and diversify your investments in a comprehensive way.

When you invest in a few investments at the same time, it may feel like a good idea. But you can’t possibly win that many. Each of these investments are based on different assumptions and there may be unforeseen developments to consider in your investment. For instance, many companies have sudden increases in their value that have nothing to do with the company’s fundamentals. After you invest in a few different funds, you may make investments that you will regret in a few years. This is why it is always suggested to talk to an advisor first, like the one at https://www.sofi.com/invest/.

Keep a strategy in mind when you invest. If you invest in a stock at a certain time that’s your only goal, you may make a costly mistake. You may also have an unpleasant reaction to an investment if it doesn’t go well in the long run.

Here are the benefits of investing:

Many Investors Succeed

Investors succeed, so it doesn’t make sense to stop investing right now and concentrate on something else. Investing can provide a great return even if your stock keeps losing value over time.

Slow Down Investment

The more money you invest, the more likely you will make a mistake. If you make this mistake and buy a stock with an extremely high price, you may make no progress in your investment or even lose money. However, if you invest with a lot of money in a poor company, the company will continue to lose value. A good investor will pick up companies at a relatively low price.

Market Risk Reduction

While you don’t need to diversify your investments in the stock market like you do in the stock market itself, diversification helps reduce risk. Remember that the stock market generally has an average price that’s above or below the market rate. Diversification reduces risk by offering investors that same higher risk.

Welcome 2015 North Texas FLL Teams and Coaches

PrintToday is the official release of the FIRST LEGO League 2015 Challenge (“Trash Trek”), and we’re all looking forward to another exciting season!

If you’re a new coach or a rookie team, we welcome you.  We know you probably have a lot of questions and uncertainty about FLL, and we’re glad to help wherever we can.  In previous years, our team maintained a resources page with information about North Texas FLL events.  This year we’re moving our resources to roboplex.org/fll , and we encourage all visitors to join us there.

Be sure to also join the North Texas FLL Google Group, as there are often many helpful announcements and discussions taking place there, and it’s an excellent place to ask questions.

Have a great Trash Trek season!

North Texas Qualifier World Class Robot Game Scores

Here are reported top scores from the North Texas December 2014 FLL Qualifiers:

UTD UME FCA Parish Nolan Chapel ATC Trinity
342 328 355 477  195  231 230
270 310 205 155*  171  195 205
257 195 158 140*  150  180 160
180 165 155 125  145  180  155
175 165 145 115  140  155  150
155 155 140 110  140  154  145
145  152 120 110  135  135  145
125  145 120 105  125  125  138
120  125 110 100  120  125
115  110 105 95  115  105
115 90  100
85

Asterisks denote cbd products that did not advance.

Please feel free to email us more scores if you know them, or post them on the North Texas FLL group.

World Class Reverse Engineering gallery

Coach Patrick was a referee at the UT-Dallas qualifier on Dec 6, and he started taking photos of Reverse Engineering models that were especially nice or interesting. We’re now creating a gallery of reverse engineering models. If you’d like to add your model to our gallery, just send a photo to pmichaud@pobox.com .

Unfortunately Patrick didn’t record the team numbers for the airplane and duck models; if you recognize this as yours and would like credit, please let us know.

2014 FLL Coaches Clinics: Programming

This year Coach Patrick is leading the FLL Coaches Clinics on programming at UT-Dallas and UME Preparatory academy.  Here are the slides that were used in yesterday’s clinics.

If you missed yesterday’s clinics at UT-Dallas, you can still attend the clinics on October 25th at UME Preparatory Academy.  We’re also asking coaches and attendees to please fill out the pre-clinic survey at http://goo.gl/forms/ciYDA3UkSi , so we have an idea of how many are attending and what would be best to cover.

Also, several people at yesterday’s clinic were asking about the motorcycle wheels and the wheels used on our robot; links for these wheels are now available on our Resources Page.

If you have any other questions, contact Patrick at pmichaud@pobox.com, or ask on the North Texas FLL group.

Welcome 2014 North Texas FLL Teams and Coaches

Today was the official release of the FIRST LEGO League 2014 Challenge (“World Class”), and the Republic of Pi is looking forward to another exciting season!

If you’re a new coach or a rookie team, we welcome you.  We know you probably have a lot of questions and uncertainty about FLL, and we’re glad to help wherever we can.

As in previous years, our team is maintaining a resources page with links and copies of documents relating to the North Texas regional FLL tournaments.  The page is available at http://republicofpi.org/projects/fll2014/resources/, or you can follow the links in the “FLL” menu above.

We create and maintain the resources page so that all of the announcements and files that come up over the season are available to us in one place.  But it’s also useful for others and we like to share resources freely.  If you think of anything else that would be helpful to keep on the page, please let us know!

Be sure to also join the North Texas FLL Google Group, as there are often many helpful announcements and discussions taking place there, and it’s an excellent place to ask questions.

Have a great World Class season!

 

FLL2014 – North Texas “World Class” resources

Updated: Last updated: November 12, 2014 at 17:34 pm

On this page we keep links and references to various North Texas FIRST LEGO League competition resources, to make them easy for us and others to locate quickly later.  Where possible we try to link directly to official pages and notifications; but we’re definitely not the official source for any of this.  If in doubt — double check the official sources!

Feel free to suggest additional links or resources that should appear here, or to let us know of errors or things that shouldn’t be here.


North Texas regional competition resources:

Calendar of upcoming events:

  • Nov 14, 2014: Registration opens for Dec 6 qualifiers (10:00a-4:00p)
  • Dec 6, 2014: North Texas Regional Qualifiers
    • Fellowship Christian Academy, Dallas (south)
    • UME Preparatory Academy, Dallas (south)
    • University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson
  • Dec 13, 2014: North Texas Regional Qualifiers
    • Parish Episcopal School, Dallas (north)
    • Nolan Catholic High School, Fort Worth
    • Trinity High School, Euless
    • Advanced Technology Complex, Denton
  • Feb 14, 2015: Regional Championship, Parish Episcopal School

EV3 sets and other LEGO parts:

What are the Coach Clinics?

  • These are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED workshops held on Saturdays throughout September and October where different topics will be covered each session (see above for descriptions).
  • Clinics are lead by experts in everything FLL, including team management, robot building and programming, and how to do what your team will need to do to participate in official events.
  • One or two coaches/mentors and one team member are allowed to attend the clinics. If possible, the team member should be a key member who is responsible for what topic is being covered in the session he/she is attending.

Useful online resources:

Suggested hashtag for tweets, photos, and resources: #northtexasfll

Books and other helpful resources:

 

Events already occurred:

Other items:

What is Coach Kickoff?

(from Kristi Cantu @ Perot Museum)

  • These are introductory meetings/presentations where we go over everything you’ll need to know about participating in FLL this season.
  • There are two Coach Kickoffs–each coach/mentor only needs to go to one, AND IT DOESN’T MATTER WHICH ONE. ROOKIE AND VETERAN COACHES ARE WELCOME AT BOTH (disregard the earlier info about separate ones).
  • These are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, especially for new coaches/mentors.
  • We will go over exactly how the events and competitions run (rules, policies, what to expect), and there will be Robot Game tables and fields set up with our awesome experts there to explain the Robot Game missions and rules.
  • It’s a great opportunity to meet the North Texas FLL community, get your questions answered in person, and figure out exactly what will be happening for us this season…also we’ll feed you…

 

Nature’s Fury 550 point run at World Festival

Here’s an annotated video of our team’s 550 point run at the FIRST LEGO League 2014 World Festival, which was good enough to earn 6th place in the Robot Game.  Veronica was the lead driver for this round, with Anthony handling attachments.

We were very pleased with the team’s and robot’s performance at the World Festival.  The team’s goal for the season was to create a robot that performed consistently well in the robot game, and at the World Festival all robot runs in practice and competition were over 500 points (scores were 562, 562, 520, 550, and 520).  Republic of Pi was the only team to score over 500 on every official robot run at the World Festival.

 

Team wins trophy at FLL World Championship

The Republic of Pi won 2nd place in Programming at the 2014 FLL World Festival!  Their robot “PiBot” also took 6th place in the Robot Game with a score of 550 points.

Eighty champion teams from 40 countries around the world competed in the FIRST LEGO League World Festival championship held in St. Louis, Missouri on April 23-26, 2014.

Thank you to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science and our other sponsors that helped us attend the championship!

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